Osama Bin Laden's last wish, according to a document purported to be his will, was that his wives not remarry after his death and his children not join al-Qaida.

Al-Anbaa, a Kuwaiti newspaper, reported on Tuesday that the will, marked "private and confidential" was dated 14 December 2001, three months after the 9/11 attacks, when US forces were hunting him in Afghanistan.

The four-page document, written on a computer and signed by "your brother Abu Abdullah Osama Muhammad Bin Laden," predicts that he would die by the "treachery" of those around him. Al-Anbaa does not reveal how or when it obtained the will or whether it was able to authenticate it. Al-Majallah, a Saudi-owned Arabic magazine, published a similar document in 2002 but it was dismissed as a fraud by a pro-jihadi website.

In the document, Bin Laden lists the assault on New York's twin towers in a sequence beginning with the suicide bomb attack on US marines in Lebanon in 1983, the killing of 19 US marines serving as UN peacekeepers in Somalia in 1993 and the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi in 1998.

But its most striking feature is that he orders his wives not to remarry and urges his children not to join al-Qaida or go to "the front", citing the example of the seventh century Muslim Caliph Omar bin Khattab to his son Abdullah. Bin Laden also asked his children to forgive him for not having spent enough time with them.

"I have chosen a path fraught with dangers and endured hardships, disappointment and betrayal. If it wasn't for betrayal, things would be different today.

"As for you, my sons, forgive me if I failed to devote more of my time to you since I answered the call to Jihad."

He ends his will by advising "the mujahideen wherever they are" to suspend "the fight against the Jews and the Crusaders and start to purge your ranks of agents and defeatists."